Media reports on Sam Bankman-Fried’s interest in buying Twitter

These follow from text messages published as part of the pre-trial proceedings

30.09.2022 - 09:35

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2 min

What’s new? According to Business Insider, there is evidence online that the head of the FTX exchange Sam Bankman-Fried was interested in buying the social network Twitter together with Elon Musk. This is evidenced by text messages published in pre-trial proceedings on the purchase of Twitter.

News on the Business Insider website

What information has been released? According to media reports, Bankman-Fried’s advisor Will MacAskill tried to arrange a meeting between the CEO of FTX and Elon Musk in March 2022. The case file revealed text messages between MacAskill and Musk about Bankman-Fried’s potential interest in buying the social network.

In the messages, MacAskill suggests that Musk discuss a possible joint effort in this direction. The Tesla CEO responded by asking if Bankman-Fried had the right amount of money, to which MacAskill replied that the FTX CEO was willing to contribute between $8 billion and $15 billion. Later in April, MacAskill brought Morgan Stanley banker Michael Grimes into the discussion of the deal, who also tried to convince Musk to involve Bankman-Fried in the Twitter purchase. Elon Musk responded to the offer with a message that he did not want to negotiate laboriously about blockchain with the head of FTX.

All of these messages were published as part of the proceedings regarding the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. The trial, which will determine whether Elon Musk should buy Twitter, will begin on October 17, 2022.

In early May 2022, Elon Musk raised $7,1 billion to buy Twitter. Binance also participated and allocated $500 million, but the $44 billion deal never took place. Lawyers for Twitter subpoenaed representatives of Binance to testify in the case of the failed purchase. According to Musk, he decided to back out because Twitter did not provide him with information about the number of spam and bots on the platform. Representatives of the social network said that it was a pretext for the rejection, and sued to force Musk to complete the deal.

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